About Me

Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

The mainframe is alive and well, according to a Business Day
article by Steve Lohr in the New York Times on Aug. 28, 2012, “I.B.M. mainframe
evolves to serve the digital world”, link here.

Companies are still buying or leasing mainframes, because of
their reliability, security, and enormous throughput. The article discusses Primemerica's recent acquisition

IBM’s latest model is called the zEnterprise EC12.

In the late 90s, OS390 was the rage.

Do programmers in IBM shops still maintain JCL and
complicated procs? It was the verbose
JCL that was considered difficult to learn back in the 1970s, when Univac 1100,
by comparison, offered a syntax a bit like today’s Unix.

Throughput improved enormously in the mid 1990s. Random VSAM updating was a problem with a “print
stacking” application that I implemented 21 years ago yesterday in a salary
deduction billing system, as it could take an hour single thread to update
30000 print image records. (We called
the system affectionately, “Bill’s bills”.) Things rapidly got much better by about
1995. But mainframe batch programmers
learned that you could process much faster by sorting and processing
sequentially.

In a previous decade, being able to sort quickly was an
accomplishment. But at Chilton
Corporation in Dallas (now Experian), we could sort 200000 300-byte VL records
in about two minutes, and that was considered an accomplishment. By the late 1980s, at a company called
Healthnet in Richmond (Blue Cross) on an IBM 3090, we could do something like
that in about thirty seconds wall clock. But the 4341 and 4381, which smaller
companies (like Lewin then) bought,
processing was much slower.

Sunday, August 26, 2012

I have changed the status on my Dice profile to "not looking for a change". That means that since I am "retired" and am effectively self-employed as a writer-blogger-media-producer, I cannot consider "conventional" information technology positions or contracts at this time.

I also will not try to renew Brainbench (or ICCP) certifications, which generally last three years. They simply are too time-consuming and not relevant to what I do now.

In practice, I haven't actually had a "conventional" IT job since my "buyout" (and layoff, at age 58) at the end of 2001, although there were two "close calls" in 2002.

I will continue to write about the market and share historical perspectives on the IT workplace.

I'll be more focused soon on my novel and screenplay manuscripts and on getting them into "agency".

That will keep me busy, but I have to avoid conflicts.

I still get a lot of irrelevant contractor inquiries about jobs in which I have not kept up "job-ready" skills (like Powerbuilder, even).

The toy video above should "entertain" -- just a few seconds (rated G, don't worry!)

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

As I noted already on my issues blog, I revisited one of my
old haunts in northern New Jersey yesterday.

In September 1972, I left the Navy Department (NAVCOSSACT)
and went to work for Univac, the Montclair NJ branch, supporting processors
(Fortran, Cobol) in the 1100 series.
After a management change, the new powers decided that I didn’t have a “marketing
profile” (I wasn’t manipulative enough in personality) and should consider a
transfer.

I actually liked the life I had, living close-in (in
northern New Jersey), but I did some interviews, including one with a defense
branch way out on Long Island (I remember the drive in the fall of 1973). Bell Laboratories then gave Sperry Univac enough
business to justify a whole separate branch in Piscataway NJ (near New
Brunswick), and that operation gave the choice of three jobs. I chose “site support".

But I had to either commute or move
myself. I wound up living in an
apartment near the Raritan River than
would have been flooded had I lived there long enough. As it was, I eventually took a new job with
NBC in New York City in August 1974 – ironically while working temporarily at
AT&T in Mount Kisco NY, which I also passed through yesterday.

Yesterday, I did stumble upon the high rise building in
which I had worked in early 1974, although I would send eleven weeks in St Paul
MN (Eagan) on an 1110 benchmark for Bell Labs.

It’s good to review your life, isn’t it. But I do find it hard to remember exactly how we did a lot of things. More on that soon.

Friday, August 10, 2012

A story by Peter Lattman in the Business Day section of the
New York Times on Friday August 10, 2012 raises the issue of employer trade
secrets, particularly when employees leave. The link is here.

Gergey Aleynikov was convicted in federal court for taking
some code from Goldman-Sachs with him when he left to form a brokerage software
startup. (It was probably something like a java library method.) Although he served over a year in federal
prison, an appeals court overturned the conviction on a technicality in the
federal industrial espionage laws.

However, New York State wants to go after him, and generally
the “double jeopardy” provision of the Fifth Amendment will not prevent this
unless prosecutors work in concert.

It is common for employees to sign non-compete agreements
(which can hurt after layoffs), and also to sign papers acknowledging their
understanding of federal laws regarding copyright, trade secrets, and even
corporate espionage.

However, in the early days of mainframe programming, it was
common for programmers (somewhat frivolously) to take code samples (printed on greenbar, sometimes)
with them as “how to do” cribsheets for
their next jobs. I even did this once in
the 1970s, even though I would not do this now.

Tuesday, August 07, 2012

I don’t know if this belongs on a workplace blog or
technical one, but I thought I would pass along a story in PC World by
Christine Des Marais, in PCWorld, in the case Bland v. Roberts, where some
employees in a sheriff’s office were fired for a Facebook like regarding the
sheriff’s political opponent.

It wasn’t immediately clear if this was done on a work
computer, or whether that mattered.

But a federal judge ruled that that a Facebook (or YouTube)
like is not “protected speech”.

However, some workplace lawyers said that the action was
like having a yard sign for a political opponent.

Was this job a political appointment? Was "employment at will" involved? Maybe not with a public position.

In 1992, I wrote an internal email (by CICS SYSM) critical of the department's laxity in giving out free copies of Procomm to take home for night support. Management complained to me about it, but I was right, as later developments in copyright law would prove.

Saturday, August 04, 2012

When you’re on your own in any business area, you learn
quickly how dependent you are on infrastructure working. That’s power (including generator
reliability), cable, use of cellular wireless hotspots for backup and for
travel. That’s security.

When you can’t work because infrastructure owned by somebody
else fails, you don’t get paid.

In the conventional work world of “salaried professional”
employment, I expected full pay and benefits even if “the system was down.” We
got used to the idea that “they” were responsible for our infrastructure. In the entrepreneurial world, there is no “they”.

Another thing is that when you’re deep within a conventional
salaried environment, the particular issues of your workplace, however arcane
in the grand scheme of things, becomes the subject of a lot personal focus. But
after “forced retirement”, you get a taste of what the “real world”—whose
infrastructure you depend on – does to survive.
Imagine a world where “volunteer firemen” fix downed power lines.

In fact, in one of my “interim jobs”, the collection agency
in 2003, we actually didn’t get paid our hourly wage when the system was down,
which did happen for two or three hours at a time on a couple of occasions.

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